


A Gentlemanbug

by orphan_account



Category: The Long Walk - Richard Bachman
Genre: Canon-Typical Mention of Suicidal Thoughts, Cuddles, Fluff, Kinda, M/M, Maybe - Freeform, McVries is an existentialist crybaby, No MeanVries, Philosophy, Sleepovers, Supernatural Elements
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 22:01:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25113556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: McVries is a little strange sometimes but Garraty doesn't love him any less for it.
Relationships: Ray Garraty/Peter McVries
Comments: 2
Kudos: 5





	A Gentlemanbug

**Author's Note:**

> I was told to write something soft. I think I only failed a little.

The soft glow of McVries' nightlight was only disturbed by the black pinpoint shadows of the flies and bugs circling it. Garraty thought that one of them might have been a lady bug, but he wasn't quite sure.

It was just bright enough to allow Garraty a telling of the time. Both handles of his wristwatch were shifting closer and closer towards the big black 12 at the dial's top. They were approaching midnight.

Garraty averted his gaze from the little device and tried to catch a glimpse of McVries' face, the strands of hair falling into it made it hard to read his expression.

McVries leaned on his shoulder one arm slung around Garraty's chest, and he wasn't half asleep as Garraty had suspected. Instead he intently watched the dial of Garraty's watch the same way Garraty had done only seconds before. Watching their time pass.  
Garraty hid the watch from McVries view by simply turning his hand around.

"Hey." he complained, his voice a drowsy whisper. They hadn't spoken in what felt like hours. There hadn't been a need too. Just sitting on McVries' bed, side by side, with nothing but their clothes separating them, that was all they really needed.

"What were you looking at my watch? We'll be dead tired for school anyways, don't matter if we go to sleep now or at 4am." Garraty said and tried to tuck the strands of hair behind McVries' ear. Half of them fell back immediately.

A thin smile spread over McVries thin face. But only for a split second before it made place for an almost childish frown.

"Just gimme back my view" he said, considered for a moment and then attempted to draw them even closer together, enclosing: "And my heart while you're at it"

Garraty didn't even bother to acknowledge that with a comment, but his heart skipped a beat nontheless. He hoped it would never stop doing so.

McVries mumbled something that could be interpreted as 'Killjoy' and loosened his hold around him in order to grab Garraty's hand and turn it around himself. There was no real force behind the action. McVries' hand lingered on caressing Garraty's fingers for just a moment to long. He interlaced them and brought the dial before his own face.

Shaking his head in fond grandmotherly disbelief, Garraty sighed in defeat.

McVries could be the most serious 15 year old Garraty had ever seen, but in moments like this, when it was only the two of them, the empty box of cookies on McVries' nightstand and the bugs lazily drifting trough the summer warm air of his room he was different.

Similarly to when his mother had shoved a bowl of grapes into their hands before they had disappeared upstairs. 'So that you got something better than these goddamn chocolate chip cookies' she had said. McVries had rolled his eyes but still turned around on the staircase to hug her goodbye. Garraty told himself that he didn't feel a longing for something long lost gnawing in his gut.

In moments like these Peter McVries was barely more than an oversized puppy with a heart of gold.

"Last Thursday I gave you my heart,  
After that nothing could us part..." he hummed in a truly poor imitation of the original song.

Now Garraty felt even more justified in his assumption. He reached over to the nightstand, plucked a grape from the bowl, throwing it at McVries. But the latter only caught it with the hand that wasn't firmly entangled with Garraty's. He lifted his head to look Garraty straight in the eye as he flipped it into his mouth. Garraty smiled

"But parting is such a fine sorrow, wouldn't you enjoy that?" he teased.

"It's a 'sweet sorrow', Ray, but you got the spirit."  
McVries nuzzled back into the crook of his shoulder. "But no it wouldn't be, not with you."

Garraty was about to reply something when he added: "Well maybe it would be, if you wanted to call death a sweet sorrow.

That knocked any answer Garraty might have come up with straight out of his mouth.

A click. Both handles pointed at the big black 12 now. It was Friday.

McVries put on his thin smile like a well worn mask and lightly nugded his jaw from below, making sure that he had Garraty's undivided attention.

"Huh?" Garraty still felt a lump in his throat, that just wouldn't go away.

"Now for the question of the day: Do you believe in Last Thursday-ism?"

Against his own will, Garraty snorted, shaking McVries off his shoulder. He gave an offended yelp and dramatically flopped away from Garraty. The mattress made him bounce a little. 

"Wait, did you actually wait for it to become Friday, just to ask me that? "

McVries sat up again, this time cross-legged, and shot him a sarcastic glance that clearly said 'Please don't question my higher, undoubtedly superior motivations'. This was a game they played a little too often for Garraty's sensible tasted but he wasn't one to complain about McVries using him as a sounding board for his more obscure takes on the universe.

No, Garraty didn't mind that at all.

"To answer you question, I'd have to be a pretty great fool to not believe in last Thursday, and all the other Thursdays before that, right?"  
He cocked his head waiting for either approval or disapproval, but McVries still wore his poker face smile.  
"Like I can clearly remember wanting to eat those cookies, but then you insisted out the ones with the most chocolate chips and give them to me," - McVries, the bastard, didn't even blush at at - "and you waiting for me after rehearsal last week's Thursday. Why wouldn't you believe in that?"

The mask on McVries' face broke, only to reveal the triumphant grin of a child who, for once, was the one who caught someone else with their hand in the cookie jar.  
"You know, this is actually the entire point of Last Thursday-ism."  
"What?"  
"Not believing in anything that happened before the last Thursday, so to speak yesterday."

Sometimes Garraty thought that McVries' mother had hugged him a little to hard as an infant, thereby cutting off his oxygen supply and interfering with important brain development.  
Especially the stuff that helped you stay in touch with reality.

"Why the hell'd you do that?" he exclaimed a little too loudly.  
"Certainly not to have you yell around in the middle of the night, waking up Katrina and probably the dead too." McVries chided him.  
"Sorry, no harm meant."

McVries put a hand to his ear and made an expression that indicated intense listening.  
There was no sound safe for their own quiet breathing and the monotonous sum of the bugs. He grinned.  
"None taken apparently.

And besides it's not like anyone could ever truly be bothered by that sweet voice of yours."

Garraty couldn't tell whether he actually meant or only said it for the sake of pleasantries. It didn't really matter if he only went along with the flow.

"Thank you Pete," he said, trying to sound as genuine as possible.  
"You still owe me an explanation though."

"Oh with pleasure." McVries swung out his arm as if he were a tired business man gifting his ever complaining wife with her third car.

"If you don't understand it yourself, how else can I pay my debt to you, Dear. It's actually as simple as can be. It says that the entire universe could have been created last Thursday, but that's just a proxy for any other point in time." His hands drew a circle in the air before him, possibly symbolizing the concept of creation.  
"And we wouldn't know it, cause everything was made to look like it was there ages before mankind could even dream of giving the world a name.

"Crazy." Garraty whispered, his interest had been sparked. Though there was a certain uneasiness coating it, coating his thoughts, like McVries had just said something that would have better been left unspoken.

He could see McVries' pupils blow up into tiny black holes that almost swallowed the hazel of his iris as he continued.

"And the great trick of it all, you wouldn't even know because all your memories would have sprung into existence. It would be the greatest lie ever told"  
He laughed, seeming just a little too delighted at the increasingly irritated expression on Garraty's face.  
"The biggest fake news of all times, Surprise surprise you're a human being, it's on every newspaper headline, when in truth you're just a random assortment of particles clinging to an imaginary past."

Garraty pulled his knees close to his chest and let his head fall against the cool wallpaper behind him. McVries cocked his head with curiousity.

"That's a sad idea you got there. Does it have a point?

I mean aside from making me think that my memories are only figments of some god's imagination?"

Their school dance last summer, that morning McVries drew him while he was still asleep. For one second, the idea presented to him made all of it seem so unimportant. Even the fact that the lady bug fluttering annoyingly close to his eyes didn't have any more past to it than he saddened him.

"Maybe you're even correct it's quite a little scary. The only point to it is that there's no way to prove it wrong. Not a single one. But that doesn't really matter, right? It really doesn't."

McVries face, once again, was nearly obscured by dark locks. He never cared about the buckets of hair falling into his face, but he also refused to let anyone, not his mother, not Garraty not even a barber cut it. He also refused to wear the pink hair ties Garraty had gotten him once. Only as a joke obviously.

The ladybug made a point landing on Garraty's nose and Garraty spoke his next words very softly, as not to disturb the small animal.

"You can say that again. Scary indeed."  
He wanted to nod for emphasis but them remembered the bug, whose little legs were still tickling the bridge of his nose.

"You mourning all our happy time together?" asked McVries.  
"That too, but you know I'm actually thinking one step further." he set on to explain.  
"If we, all of this sprung up into existence like a fucking Jack in the Box, nothing in one moment and me failing maths in the next, then it all could disappear just as quickly. You understand what I mean?"

He paused. It wasn't that Garraty was particularly afraid of death, he just wasn't quite ready to embrace it without knowing why, when and were it would lead him.  
Unlike McVries who didn't know such doubts.

"Or maybe it would only be you that disappeared or this goddamn ladybug, and no one would remember. Cause some God thought the world looked better without."

He raised an arm to point at his nose, but that very moment the ladybug was gone. Flying off somewhere he couldn't see anymore.

McVries didn't even bother to take notice. Instead he folded his hands in his lap and looked Garraty straight in the eye.  
"Yeah, maybe _you_ got a point there. But who said that it was God, who did all the creating?"

Garraty shrugged.  
"I did, probably. Cause that's how my mom taught me and that's how they taught in it school later too."  
A doubting expression bloomed on McVries half obscured face.  
"But I guess it's really stupid no matter no matter if he created the world 13 billion years or 24 hours ago. Why'd you, no why'd God do that?"

"Maybe it's cause God's a little bitch that couldn't wait to sent some poor little humans to hell."

"I thought you were an atheist." Garraty said feigning actual shock.

"Well maybe you thought wrong and I'm only the most spiteful Christ on the whole planet." McVries said and snickered into his hand.

Suddenly his eyes had cleared of the sleepiness that had taken a hold of them. He straightened his back, supporting himself with one arm and looked up where a beige ceiling separated them from infinity.

"And maybe it wasn't even God. Hell what's 'God' but a fancy word for our fear of death. Maybe it was just someone who needed a world exactly like this one. The expansion of the universe, the Vietnam war and the United States. Us, discussing just that way past our bedtime."

"Definitely _way_ past our bedtime, cause there's no reason anyone would need, even want two dumb kids-"

"Hey," McVries leaned forward and flicked his fingers against Garraty's shoulder. "I thought I was the self-deprechiating one. But you're right we're dumb as shit still being up with school starting in less than five hours."

"You just confirmed your own hypothesis." Garraty smiled.

It was a little sad smile, because this had been one of McVries prettier 'confirmations of his own hypothesis'. Garraty all too clearly remembered a day, still early in their relationship, when he had thought had McVries had been on the phone with his ex-girlfriend, but as soon as he entered the bathroom, he realized that there was no phone. Only McVries, yelling at his own reflection.

"My point still stands Petie," Garraty continued, knowing well that McVries hated that nickname coming from anyone but his mother.  
"Why'd _anyone_ wanna do that."

"You really think you could understand, not speak of judge, the motivations of someone, who could have created you, the entire universe from scratch?" There was no verdict in his voice. Only genuine curiosity.

"I don't think so, I don't think anyone could." Garraty said, admitting his defeat.

"But not understanding it makes you feel uncomfortable, right?" asked McVries, almost compassionately, but there was an intent searching undertone to the question.

"Yeah I guess. Though I also guess I don't think about the motivations behind a spontaneous creation of the universe all that often."

"Maybe you should."

McVries crawled from his spot opposite to Garraty back to his side, laying his head next to his hip.

"Maybe you should _dream_ about it. I certainly could."

He tucked at the sleeve of Garraty's pajama shirt. Only that it was actually McVries' pajama shirt, as Garraty had forgotten to throw one of his own into the duffel bag he always took to their sleepovers. He guessed that McVries wouldn't have minded him being shirtless, but _he_ certainly would have been a little self conscious. Not least because McVries looked like a more willowy version of Superman under his red hoodie.

"Let's go to sleep Ray, shall we?" He grabbed Garraty's hand to take a look at his watch. "It's past 1am, witching hour is long over."

Garraty grinned.  
"I certainly won't _go_ to sleep. I'll lay myself to sleep if anything at all." he said and scuffled down until his head was level with McVries.  
The latter only groaned.  
"Maybe you better leave the wordplay to someone who actually knows what they're doing."

Garraty turned on his side to face McVries and said "Oh would you know anyone who does?"  
McVries honoured this by elbowing Garraty in the side. He chuckled.

"Good night Pete"

"Good night baby" McVries cheered, not sounding the least bit tired, even though Garraty knew he was.

"I hate it when you call me that. It makes me feel like a girl." he mumbled against the pillow.

Silence.

"Goodnight Ray?"

"I love you."

McVries smiled and propped himself up on his elbow to shut off the light.

There was a soft _click_ when he pushed the switch of the nightlight and drowned the room in darkness. Robbed of any visual input Garraty became intensely aware of his own heart beat and the warm body beside him.

The sheets rustled a bit as McVries pulled them over their bodies. It was very quiet sound. He shifted once more to put his head on Garraty's shoulder and a hand on his chest, right over his heart.

 _So he'll know I'm there and well, falling asleep and waking up That's why he does it_  
Garraty always liked to think that. Maybe he'd ask McVries about it tomorrow.

He spent a few more moments dwelling on the idea. Then he drifted off into the land of dreams that was even sweeter than his waking world.

Atleast he hoped that it would be.

The same ladybug that had sat on Garraty's nose not even ten minutes ago landed on the now dark bulb of McVries' nightlight.

It was still hot. A person would have burned their fingers quite badly but the lady bug didn't have a mind to mind the remains of electrical heat below its little legs. It crawled over the bulb into the lampshade, forever unaware of the two sleeping boys or the ever expanding universe around them.

The next moment it was gone.  
And it was very good _._


End file.
